1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to impulse noise mitigation, and, in particular, to mitigating impulse noise impact on packet preamble detection.
2. Description of the Related Art
Impulse noise in communications systems is a category of noise which includes unwanted spikes or sharp pulses. Impulse noise is one of the most difficult transmission impairments to suppress and can cause severe performance degradation in communications.
In power line communication (PLC) systems, changing load on the power network results in unwanted impulse noise that may affect the ability of a receiver to detect transmitted packets. For example, a voltage spike due to impulse noise may make it impossible for the receiver to identify a packet preamble and thus lose the entire packet. Such impulse noise effects are particularly difficult to overcome in systems using protocols where packet deliveries are not scheduled in advance and the receiver has no a priori knowledge about when packets will arrive.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for efficiently mitigating the effects of impulse noise in communications.